Berkeley Scholar Clarifies Structural Racism 5 Years On

Terms like "systemic racism" and "structural racism" have become commonplace in the five years since George Floyd was murdered by a Minnesota police officer, inspiring people nationwide to protest police brutality and anti-Black racism in historic numbers. But amid the discourse, Stephen Menendian noticed an omission. "Amazingly, astonishingly, there [was] no book on structural racism out there," said Menendian, who serves as the research director of UC Berkeley's Othering & Belonging Institute.

Fortunately, Menendian, a housing and education scholar, has been toiling over just such a book for the past 15 years. The result, Structural Racism: The Dynamics of Opportunity and Race in America, was released this June. In it, he systematically documents how the bureaucracy of American life, mostly unintentionally, reinforces racial inequality. Then he outlines 10 broad policy proposals that he believes would counter this quiet but crushing inertia and actively promote racial equity.

Menendian's articulation of structural racism builds on earlier conceptualizations of how race, privilege and opportunity are interconnected. In the 1960s, scholars and activists talked about institutional racism, or the idea that "racial inequality could be perpetuated even in the absence of overt discrimination, antipathy, prejudice or bigotry," he explained. The idea of systemic racism took that insight and widened the aperture.

If an elementary explanation of racism focused on one bad actor, such as a racist teacher, then institutional racism might look at the way that discipline in schools, while theoretically race-agnostic, entrenches inequality. Systemic racism would then go further, examining not just discipline but also curriculum design and school funding. And then structural racism, which Menendian refers to as the "widest possible view," would also factor in how, for instance, exclusionary zoning, public health systems and employment practices interact to constrain access to opportunity and well-being for too many people of color.

Menendian's new book focuses on the dramatic disparities between Black and white Americans, which the Othering & Belonging Institute also quantifies via an interactive dashboard with more than 80 metrics. Menendian said the underlying idea, however, can be generalized to various racial groups in the U.S. and abroad. Below, he spoke with UC Berkeley News to elaborate on the concept of structural racism and give concrete examples of how it crops up all around us.

UC Berkeley News: Why do you feel it's important to talk about structural racism at this moment?

Stephen Menendian: Five years after the largest protest movement in American history, very little has fundamentally changed. Not only that, many - if not most - of the policy accomplishments achieved since are being rolled back. We have to get it right next time that that window opens.

How do you define structural racism?

It is a way in which we understand the causes and perpetuation of racial inequality as being rooted in the organization of systems and structures, rather than driven by bigotry or racist ideas.

If I had a magic wand and I could wave that wand and make a wish and say that every American will be free of bigotry, prejudice or interpersonal racism, what would change, in terms of measured outcomes of racial inequality? Would life expectancy change? Maternal mortality? Disparate rates of dementia? Would the racial wealth gap suddenly even out? The answer is no. Once you create an organized system, it can continue to produce the same outcomes regardless of intent.

I'll give you an example: We used to have racial zoning in the United States, where people couldn't move into neighborhoods based on race. Then we moved to single-family zoning or fiscal zoning. The motivation in many cases is not to keep out Black people, but it's to keep out the poor. It has the effect of maintaining racial segregation.

The second way that I describe structural racism is what I call the racialization of opportunity structures.

The opportunity structure is the complex lattice that allows people to rise or keeps them from rising. The basic elements of it are a good education, a healthy environment and good jobs. Do you live in an economically strong region or a declining and suffering region? Do you live in a city like Youngstown, Ohio, or like San Francisco? Do you live in a neighborhood that has strong public goods, safe neighborhoods and great schools, or do you live in a neighborhood that has crime, violence and underperforming schools? We've sorted people by income and wealth across these neighborhoods, and that correlates to the investments we make in people. The simplest way that I have to describe structural racism is that local opportunity structures in the United States consistently and predictively perpetuate racial advantage and disadvantage based on race.

Black Americans disproportionately live in low-opportunity environments, even if they earn high incomes. White Americans disproportionately - it's not 100%; there are places like Appalachia or parts of the rural South - live in high-opportunity environments.

My position is that racial inequality is largely, but not entirely, caused by structural arrangements. Structural racism is the callous neglect to that reality.

"Structural racism" has become something of a buzzword in political conversations. How do people misunderstand the concept?

The first misunderstanding is that people will recognize that racial inequality can be systemic, but nonetheless spend their energy looking for the perpetrator, the spider - a nefarious racist actor - instead of dismantling the web. It's a huge mistake because in many cases, the spider either never existed or is long-deceased. Think about a lot of things that happened post-Floyd: tearing down statues, renaming buildings. Renaming buildings could not be less important to solving contemporary structural racial inequality. I'm not saying it's irrelevant and symbolically unimportant. But if your goal is to reduce life-expectancy disparities or income and wealth disparities, renaming a building is going to have zero effect on that.

The second big misunderstanding is to what extent contemporary racial inequalities are a legacy of the past, meaning traceable to slavery and Jim Crow. One conception of institutional racism or even structural racism is it's pretty much all just legacy. I take the opposite view. In fact, it's much worse than that. The policies that, since the Civil Rights Movement, actually undergird and exacerbate racial inequality are not directly traceable to the past.

I'll give you examples. The subprime mortgage crisis was conjured up by financial wizards on Wall Street in the 1980s and '90s to create massive profits, which led to a devastating wipeout of Black and, to a lesser extent, Latino wealth. Those wizards weren't Ku Klux Klan members; they were just motivated by greed. The vulnerable targets were Black would-be homeowners in Black neighborhoods, who were given these subprime loans even when they qualified for prime loans. And in fact, Wall Street financiers partnered with local brokers, friendly faces, often Black faces, to push these products in these neighborhoods.

I'll give you a second example: mass incarceration. You look at the number of people per 100,000 that are incarcerated in this country - essentially for 150 years, it's pretty stable. You have the same rate from basically through the 19th century to about 1970. It's not until the 1970s - really the 1980s and especially the '90s - that you have this huge rise in mass incarceration that is not understandable as a direct legacy of past "systems of racial control." You don't go from Jim Crow to mass incarceration as an inevitability. There is some additional policy formulation that has to take place. To simply regard them as a legacy of the past dramatically underestimates how innovative and insidiously adaptive these developments are.

What is an everyday decision that someone who is well-intentioned might be making that inadvertently contributes to structural racism?

Where they decide to put their kids in school. Do you put your kid in a public school or private school? Do you enroll your kid in a charter? Do you live in a neighborhood that's diverse, but then put your kids into a private school? Do you put money into the PTA? Does that widen inequality between the urban district and your suburban district? Where does your retirement money go - what kind of investments are made there? Do you push for beautification projects in your neighborhood that maybe leave other neighborhoods behind? Do you support restrictive zoning to maximize the value of your property and keep out low-income people?

There are so many things that we do every day that perpetuate racial inequality. Our goal isn't racism, but the effect is massive racial inequality. The real problem is that the system is set up so that rational behavior - doing the best thing for our kids, for a nest egg, for our home value, for retirement savings - actually tends to exacerbate racial inequality in every way. It's a collective action problem, where we can't individually change it but our decisions exacerbate it.

You write, "Structural racism is better understood as a Northern phenomenon that spread to the rest," which might surprise readers. Could you expand on that?

If [racism] were merely a legacy of the past, then we would expect that the key components of it, in the U.S., would be Southern, but they are not. Southern-style segregation was principally school-based and in public accommodations and public spaces. It was not principally residential. The white homeowners needed the help to live close. So residential segregation was actually institutionalized in the early 20th century as a response to the Great Migration and labor competition in the North, not in the South. All the things that we see emerge that are associated with structural racism today are actually largely Northern, not Southern: municipal fragmentation, neighborhood stratification and racial and economic segregation. The most segregated areas for school segregation are the Northeast and the Midwest. Places like California were the pioneers for three strikes, not Alabama.

On the flip side, could you give an example of where policy has successfully helped reduce structural racism?

The Twin Cities, Minneapolis-St. Paul, has a tax base sharing policy that was put in place in the '70s. It said that any increase in municipal revenue would be shared by everyone in the region and split up equitably. A study decades later found that far more municipalities were net winners from this policy than would have been losers. That kind of policy, which I call fiscal regionalism, as opposed to political regionalism, puts the needs of the region over the self-interested desires of certain really privileged municipalities. That's a very powerful example of how to combat structural racism or racial inequality.

For those interested in a deeper dive than one article can provide, Menendian's book, Structural Racism, is now available. Menendian and the Othering & Belonging Institute have published an annotated bibliography outlining the materials he found enlightening in compiling the book, as well as an interactive tool that shows the racial disparities in more than 80 areas.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.